Getting Better Radeon Polaris Performance On Ubuntu 17.04 With Mesa 17.1, Linux 4.11

While Ubuntu 17.04 is set to ship next month with Linux 4.10 and Mesa 17.0 as a big upgrade over the open-source graphics stack found in Ubuntu 16.10, if you switch over to using Mesa 17.1 and Linux 4.11 is the potential for even better performance. Here are some Radeon RX 470 tests in different combinations on Ubuntu 17.04.

As some extra weekend benchmarks, here are some fresh tests when using Ubuntu 17.04 in its current state out-of-the-box, when upgrading to Mesa 17.1-devel with LLVM 5.0 SVN, when Mesa 17.1-dev and also switching to Linux 4.11 Git, and also an extra run with Mesa 17.1 + Linux 4.11 when switching over to P-State's performance governor. The Ubuntu 17.04 kernel configuration is continuing to default to Intel P-State powersave for newer Intel CPUs by default; here are some extra P-State performance figures similar to our various CPUFreq/P-State driver/governor comparisons. For those wanting to use Mesa 17.1-dev on Ubuntu 17.04, Padoka PPA currently doesn't have official support for the Zesty Zapus, but if changing the repo to using the Yakkety path, the packages will still work fine on Ubuntu 17.04 for now.

All tests were done with a Radeon RX 470 for this quick weekend benchmarking fun.

Yep, the stock configuration is the slowest compared to what can be achieved with newer open-source Radeon driver code:

Some results:

Dota 2's Vulkan performance is better with Linux 4.11, as shown in past Phoronix articles.


Serious Sam's Vulkan performance is better with RADV from Mesa 17.1-dev, but didn't see a boost with Linux 4.11.

Tesseract is one of the games seeing gains with using P-State performance.

Many other Linux OpenGL games see minor gains with the newer driver code.

See more early Ubuntu 17.04 Radeon RX Polaris graphics benchmark results via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file. More GPU card tests coming up shortly.